How to Open Your iPhone’s App Library Faster from Your Home Screen or Anywhere Else « iOS & iPhone :: Gadget Hacks

The App Library is an excellent tool for browsing all the apps on your iPhone, especially since it contains all the home screen bookmarks you’ve created for websites and shortcuts. But it’s all after your last home screen page. If you have a lot of visible home screen pages, you have to swipe a lot to open the app library. Luckily, there’s a trick to accessing it faster.

Options we need to open the app library but don’t have

Ideally, Apple would include an option to show an app icon for the app library itself, and we could place it in the dock for easy access from any home screen. Apple already gives the iPad a “Show App Library in Dock” toggle to do just that, so why can’t the iPhone have it?

There isn’t even a known URL scheme assigned to the app library that would allow us to create a bookmark icon – which looks exactly like an app icon – for the home screen. The Apple TV Remote was only accessible through Control Center prior to iOS 16.0, but now it can behave more like a real app with its new URL scheme. So why can’t we do the same for the App Library on iPhones?

For users who use access settings to interact with their devices, finding and opening the App Library can be tricky. If you’re having trouble swiping the screen, you’re out of luck. There’s no app library option for Back Tap, AssistiveTouch, or the accessibility shortcut, and asking Siri to open the app library will only frustrate you. When are we getting these, Apple?

Your only options to open App Library faster on iPhone

As far as I know, there are only four options to access the app library faster on your iPhone. They’re no better than some of the nonexistent methods I mentioned above, but they’ll do for now. Options 1 and 2 aren’t very good as they involve reconfiguring your home screen, so options 3 and 4 might be the best way to go.

Option 1: Restrict your homepages

You can limit the number of your home screen pages so swiping to the app library doesn’t take as long. This isn’t ideal if you want all your apps on home screen pages. However, if you only have two active home screen pages, that’s two small swipes to the left of the screen to open the app library.

Option 2: Hide your home pages

You can also hide home screen pages until you need them, which has the same effect as option 1 above. This is also not ideal if you frequently access the apps on your hidden home screen pages. But if you like the app library, you can remove it with a left swipe, and then bring up the home screen pages whenever you want or need to.

Option 3: Use a two-swipe gesture

On iOS 16.0 and later, just touch the search button above your dock and without releasing it, drag it to the right until you reach the last page of the home screen. Then release and swipe left to open the App Library.

If you hide the search button on iOS 16.0 and later, or haven’t yet updated to an iOS 16 firmware, you’ll instead see dots above the dock showing all of your home screen pages. Touch and drag the highlighted point to the right until it stops, then swipe left on the last page of the home screen to open the app library. This is actually a bit faster than swiping the search button.

Option 4: Use voice control without swipes

Siri may not be able to open the App Library for you, but Voice Control’s accessibility feature can. It might not be faster than the swipe options above, but it helps when you don’t want to swipe.

You have more than a few options for opening and closing Voice Control.

1. Go to Settings –> Accessibility –> Voice Control and then toggle Voice Control on or off. However, that’s just more swiping.
2. Add it to your accessibility shortcut (Settings -> Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut) so it’s just a triple click on the home or side button away. If you have assigned more than one option to the shortcut, tap Voice control in the drop-down menu.
3. Assign it to a back tap gesture (Settings -> Accessibility -> Touch -> Back Tap). Then double or triple tap the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone.

Could we see better options? Maybe…

That’s as good as it gets for now (unless you want to jailbreak your iPhone). The fastest swipe isn’t even great, as you can accidentally hold the screen for too long, which will bring up the home screen editor. Perhaps one day Apple will add at least one of the aforementioned proposals, but who knows when.